


Last Time I Say Sorry

by msred



Series: Starting Over [27]
Category: American (US) Actor RPF, Real Person Fiction
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Married Life, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-14
Updated: 2020-08-14
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:15:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25887205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/msred/pseuds/msred
Summary: I hadn’t been so angry in a long time. I hadn’t been that angry at Chris ever.
Relationships: Chris Evans (Actor) & Original Female Character(s), Chris Evans (Actor) & Reader, Chris Evans (Actor) & You, Chris Evans (Actor)/Original Female Character(s), Chris Evans (Actor)/Reader, Chris Evans (Actor)/You
Series: Starting Over [27]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1423663
Comments: 20
Kudos: 52





	Last Time I Say Sorry

_ 22 months together, 6 months married (early December, Year 3) _

I hadn’t been so angry in a long time. I hadn’t been that angry at Chris  _ ever.  _ Still, even as I lay in the bed alone, my face buried in my pillow since the layout of the room didn’t allow me to turn my back to the door without laying crossways across the bed, I knew that he hadn’t meant for the things he’d said to be hurtful. They had been, though. And then when I’d told him so he’d gotten defensive, which had made him curt, and … Well. It hadn’t been pretty. And I wasn’t completely innocent by any means. I’d said some ugly things too, after he’d initially hurt me then failed to walk it back, to acknowledge what he’d done in a deep and sincere way. But I’d caught myself just as I’d started feeling the urge to raise my voice and I’d looked at him and simply told him that I was going to bed, and that I would appreciate it if he would give me some time. And so, for the past hour, almost, I’d been in bed alone, trying unsuccessfully to go to sleep.

I didn’t see or hear him, but I knew when he came to stand in the doorway. Millie lifted her head and eyed him a little warily from the dogs’ bed on the other side of the room, having followed me up when I’d left Chris alone in the kitchen, then huffed and laid her chin back on her paws. “Can I come in?” he asked, quietly. Dodger didn’t wait for permission, his nails clicking cheerfully on the hardwood as he crossed the room to join his sister.

“It’s your house,” I answered, flinching inwardly as I did. It wasn’t meant to be passive aggressive, but as soon as it was out of my mouth, I realized that it was, all things considered.

“It’s  _ our  _ house,” he contradicted, his socked feet padding into the room and toward the chair in the corner. “And there are plenty of other rooms, if you’d rather not share this one with me right now.” I heard his belt  _ clink  _ open, but there was a pregnant pause while I anticipated the sound of his zipper sliding down.

“It’s fine,” I told him after several seconds of silence. “I’m fine.” And then I heard the metallic  _ zip  _ and the rustle of his jeans as he pushed them down his legs and stepped out of them before dropping them into the chair. 

I kept my back to his side of the bed as he approached, and I felt the comforter and sheet lifting on his side, then the dip in the mattress as he settled behind me. He didn’t lay down, though, the familiar warmth that lulled me to sleep nearly every night as he wrapped himself around me noticeably absent, instead sitting, I assumed, with his back pressed to the headboard and his legs running the length of my back and then some.

His touch was tentative, at first. Extremely tentative. He started with my hair, combing his fingers through it where it lay on my pillow without actually touching  _ me _ . I could just feel the light sensations in my scalp, the almost-tickle, as his fingers moved through the strands again and again. “I’m sorry,” he said, and I pushed all the air from my burning lungs. It wasn’t the first time he’d said it, there had been a couple others before I’d come upstairs, but they’d been half-hearted, begrudging, almost, like he didn’t truly understand what he was sorry for and was saying it because he was supposed to or just to get me to let it go. That time felt different, genuine, sincere. I felt my shoulder fall away from my ear on the side that wasn’t pressed into the mattress and just after it did his hand came up to trace around my ear, moving errant wisps of hair off my cheek. “And that’s not enough, I know,” his hand ventured from my hair down my back, just a little, his fingertips ghosting over my shoulder blade through my shirt, “but, it’s a start. I hope.” I squeezed my eyes shut and bit the inside of my cheek and nodded, my cheek rubbing across the pillowcase under my head. 

“I understand now how hurtful my words were,” I tensed again and he stilled his hand on my back just below my shoulder blade, his thumb just brushing my spine and his fingers resting on my ribcage, “and I should have realized that, and acknowledged it, earlier.” I forced my muscles to relax, employing the yoga technique of starting with my fingers and toes and working my way to my core, until I’d managed to push the tension away again. He went back to running his hand lightly and carefully up and down my back and side. “I was, well,” he sighed, “I wasn’t drunk, but I’d had a few drinks,” I slowly drew in a deep breath, ready to shut him down if he tried to use that to excuse the things he’d said, but he went on, “and that’s not an excuse. It’s not. But it slowed down my brain. Unfortunately, it didn’t do the same for my mouth.”

I wasn’t ready to say anything yet. I didn’t want to say something nasty, to make things worse when he was trying to make them better, and I didn’t trust that if I opened my mouth something ugly wouldn’t come out. Not yet. I nodded again, though, and crossed my lower arm over my body to let my fingertips brush over his on my hip. His fingers dug into my side for a second and I heard him let out an audible breath, then he was shifting, lifting his hand off me and scooting down the bed, turning onto his side and bringing his other hand to my hip where the first had been, sliding that first hand under his pillow and pressing his forehead to the back of my head. “I don’t ever want to see that look on your face again,” he murmured into my hair, “and I sure as  _ shit  _ don’t ever want to be the one who puts it there.” He moved his hand slowly from my hip across my lower abdomen, pausing after the first couple inches then going on when I didn’t stop him or pull away, not stopping until he was tucking his fingertips under my other hip. “I’m gonna start working on quitting,” he almost whispered.

My eyes flew open and I rolled onto my back so that I could look over at him, letting my right hand fall out to my side on the mattress and resting my left on my own stomach, the tips of my fingers just barely sitting atop his hand so he didn’t feel like he had to move it off me. “That’s not -,” I caught myself before I finished the sentence,  _ That’s not what I asked you to do _ , because I realized it wouldn’t come out the way I really meant it to, wouldn’t really convey what I was trying to say, and after everything, I couldn’t do that, couldn’t send the wrong message, a potentially harsh, passive aggressive message. So I took a second to gather my thoughts then started again. “I’m not asking you for that.”

He shifted his hand up to run his fingers over mine, to play with them lightly. “But it would make you happy, right?”

I very nearly scoffed but managed to turn it into a light cough at the last second. To say that it would make me happy if he quit smoking was the understatement of our marriage so far. I turned my head on my pillow so that we were nose-to-nose, albeit with far more space between us than usual. “It would. It would make me very happy.”

He nodded. “I’m gonna try. It’s gonna take a while, and I might still slip up when I’m working away from home, just warning you, but I’m gonna work at it.”

“But Chris -”

“I know,” he released my fingers only to close his whole hand around mine, “that wasn’t really the point. I get that, I just wanted to get that part out of the way.” I watched him closely, my eyes darting back and forth between his from under my furrowed brow. “I get why you didn’t want me smoking so close to the house, so close to the door, and it was totally reasonable for you to ask.” My brow knitted a little tighter and I went back to chewing on the inside of my bottom lip. “And, more importantly, I know that the way I reacted was,” he frowned, looking at my mouth, and I forced myself to release my lip from between my teeth, “shitty,” he finally said. “I didn’t mean it to be, but I didn’t think before I spoke.”

_ This is my house _ , his words rang again in my ears,  _ I’m not gonna be kicked out of my own house to go stand in the snow _ . I recoiled a little, my face and eyes turning back toward the ceiling. Remembering his words, and the way he’d looked at me when he said them - like he couldn’t believe that I would dare ask him to go smoke far enough away from the house,  _ his  _ house, that the smoke wouldn’t creep inside (because, to be fair, he had gone outside on his own, but he’d huddled up against the house, right next to the back door on the patio, out of the wind and the flurries of snow that were just starting to fall) - stung only slightly less than they had the first time.

“I’m a dick sometimes, I know that.” I blinked at the ceiling. “But I never want to be a dick to you. And I never,  _ never  _ meant to imply that this is anything other than  _ our  _ house, our home.” I couldn’t help but roll my eyes and he tugged at my hand a little until I rolled my head to the side again so he could look me in the eyes. “I know that my intentions don’t really matter when the result was hurting you like I did, but I still want you to know that I didn’t mean it that way. At all.”

“You got so,” I trailed off, looking down at our hands on my stomach, “defensive. Like you were angry at me for being hurt.”

“I  _ was  _ angry. But not at you, of course not at you,” he pushed himself up a little with the arm under his pillow and kissed my forehead, feather-light. “I was angry at my dumb ass for putting that look on your face, and the defensiveness just kicked in because I didn’t want it to be true. I guess some stupid part of me thought that if I could convince you you had no reason to be hurt, that it would be true.”

I lowered my eyes to stare at the hollow of his throat as I spoke. “Do you remember, way back in the beginning, when I told you I had no business being with you because I don’t matter the way you do?”

“Fuck,” he breathed. He let go of my hand to curl his hand over my hip and pull at me gently until I rolled onto my side, then he wrapped his arm around me and flattened his hand at the small of my back. “Of course I remember. I think that was the last time I saw that look.” He leaned forward and pressed his lips just above my nose, between my eyebrows, for a few seconds then pulled back and went on. “I told myself then it would be the last time. And then I fucked that up tonight.”

My left hand had gotten trapped between us when he rolled me over and I pushed it up between our bodies until I could rest the tips of my index and middle fingers in that hollow I’d been staring at. “That was almost two years ago, and I thought I’d left those insecurities, that imposter syndrome of not belonging in your life, behind. But then you looked me in the face downstairs and called this ‘your house,’ and you were so serious, so  _ hard,  _ almost, and every negative thing I’d thought about myself back then was right at the surface, bubbling over. I know, legally, that it  _ is  _ your house. My name’s not on the deed, and that’s fine. It was your hard-earned money that paid for it. But,” my breath stuttered as I pulled in a long inhale, “that feeling, when it felt like you were saying it’s yours alone, like I’m just visiting or something and don’t truly  _ belong  _ here, that was … devastating.” I finally looked back up at his face and his eyes were wide and a little red, a small pool of tears shimmering at the bottom of each one. 

He pulled me tight against him then, pressing his hand tighter against my back and working his other arm from under his pillow to snake under my shoulder and hook up until he cradled the back of my head. “That’s not,” his lips moved across my forehead, his beard scratching my skin lightly, “ _ fuck _ . That’s not okay. Of all the asshole things I could ever do, I didn’t think it was possible for me to be a big enough asshole to make you question your place in my life or in our home. Because baby girl, all I want for the rest of my life is for you to be at the center of both.” He turned to rest his cheek against my forehead and his skin was damp where it met mine. We lay like that for several long moments, his fingers tracing circles over my lower back while his other hand massaged my scalp lightly, my hand still sitting in the center of his chest and the other settling on his bicep. Finally he asked, without pulling back, “Do you want to move?”

I pushed him away until I could look at his face. “Move?” I asked, bewildered.

He nodded. “Yeah, find a place together, start from scratch.”

“You love this house.”

“I  _ love  _ you. And if starting over, doing the whole thing together, will make you feel more comfortable, quiet that noise in your brain, we’ll start tomorrow.”

“ _ I  _ love this house.” I hesitated. I’d forgiven him - I was still raw, but I’d forgiven him - and I almost didn’t want to say the rest out of fear of making him think I was holding a grudge or picking a fight. But if I didn’t say it, and he figured that out, he’d be frustrated with me for holding back. “The house isn’t the problem,” I started, and found myself stuck.

He nodded though, like he knew what I was going to say, and brought his hand from the back of my head to fit between my cheek and the pillow. “I learned something tonight. I learned that just because I know that this house would never be a home to me anymore if you’re not sharing it with me, that doesn’t mean I should assume that’s so obvious to you. _ I _ know how much I love you, what an important part of my life you are, and I take it for granted that you know that too, that you don’t have those insecurities anymore.” His thumb drifted over my cheekbone, “I won’t make that mistake again.”

I watched his eyes for a few seconds and they didn’t move from mine; I don’t think he even blinked. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. I’d spent the last hour, a little more, really, being so angry about the pain he’d caused me that I was exhausted. But more than that, I just didn’t want to be angry at him anymore. I believed him when he promised that he hadn’t meant his words the way they’d come out, and more importantly, I believed that knowing he’d hurt me had hurt him and that he meant what he said about learning from it and doing better from that point forward. I tilted my chin forward and pressed my lips to his. I swear I heard a sound that could only be described as a whimper and then he was kissing me back, moving his lips gently and carefully against mine, pulling lightly when I made a move to back away and drawing me back in for several more seconds. 

“I love you and your beautiful heart, my sweet girl.”

“I love you too,” I told him before sliding a few inches down the mattress and draping my arm over his waist, waiting there until he took the hint and rolled onto his back so that I could tuck myself into his side and rest my head on his chest. “I’m sorry if I overreacted.”

“Nope.” One of his arms curled under and around me, his hand coming up to grip my hip, and the other laid across my arm and held my shoulder to keep me close. “Don’t do that. Your feelings matter.” He kissed my head then settled his chin on top of it, “You told me those feelings and it made me see something about myself that I didn’t like, so I got defensive.  _ I  _ overreacted.”

The cotton of his t-shirt chafed my cheek lightly as I nestled it against his chest. I closed my hand around the fabric at his side and frowned, “Why are you wearing this?”

He held me a little tighter. “You were upset with me. I didn’t want to cross any lines, make you uncomfortable. I was just happy you were allowing me into bed with you, I didn’t want to push it.”

I tilted my head back to look up at him a little skeptically, “You took off your  _ pants _ .”

He lowered his eyebrows and tilted his head a little to one side, “But I kept on my underwear.” He said it so matter-of-factly I was almost waiting for a  _ duh  _ to follow. “I’m not going to get into bed in my jeans.”

I rolled my eyes, but a small smile tugged at the corner of my lips as I lowered my head back to his chest. He kissed the top of my head once I was settled again, and I dragged my hand from where it still curled around his side down to the hem of his t-shirt. I toyed with the cotton fabric for a moment then slipped my fingers under it. “You’re gonna need to take it off,” I told him without looking up, allowing my hand to start to drift up his stomach. 

“Yeah?”

I nodded and turned to press a kiss to his chest through the offending garment, my hand still snaking up his torso. “The boxer briefs too.”

He slipped his own hand under my shirt, then, at my hip. “Are we about to have our first make-up sex?” And okay, I hadn’t thought about it being our  _ first  _ but yeah, actually, that’s what it was. We’d only had one real fight, anything more than a couple minutes of stupid, pointless bickering, before, and that had been a year and a half earlier, before we’d even started sleeping together. We hadn’t had anything that could be remotely considered a fight since we’d been married, still very much in our honeymoon period. (And that was part of why what had happened earlier that night had caught me so off guard, making it hurt that much more.)

“I mean,” I smirked as he started to roll toward me, effectively pushing me onto my back and hovering over me on one arm, that forearm crossing under my shoulders and his fingers pressing into the flesh of my upper arm, as the other hand dragged slowly across my skin just above the waistband of my shorts, “I feel like we have to. I think there’s like, a rule, or something.”

He kissed me and hummed against my lips. “Well,” he dragged his beard across my skin until he was attaching his lips to the side of my neck, “if there’s a rule, then yeah, we gotta follow it. I’ve messed up enough for one night, I wanna make sure I do everything right for the rest of it.”

And, well, he did everything very,  _ very  _ right. 

**Author's Note:**

> The story itself wasn't inspired by a song, but after I'd written it and was trying to think of a title I realized how much it reminded me of this beautiful one (https://youtu.be/ZHuv0hO-D7w). 10/10 recommend giving it a listen.
> 
> "Last Time I Say Sorry" (Kane Brown & John Legend)
> 
> I won't say I'm sorry over and over  
> Can't just say I'm sorry, I've gotta show you  
> I won't do it again, I'll prove my love is true  
> I hope the last time I said sorry  
> Is the last time I'll say sorry to you
> 
> The first time I slept on the couch, was our first New Year's Eve  
> I heard words come out my mouth that I still can't believe  
> Broken hearts and shattered champagne  
> We both don't wanna feel that again  
> The second I apologized you said, "Boy, I don't know"  
> I said it 'cause I meant it but you still wouldn't let it go  
> So I swallow my pride, see it from your side  
> I promise I'll do the best I can do
> 
> I won't say I'm sorry over and over  
> Can't just say I'm sorry, I've gotta show you  
> I won't do it again, I'll prove my love is true  
> I hope the last time I said sorry  
> Is the last time I'll say sorry to you
> 
> No, oh, oh (oh)  
> No, oh, oh  
> To you  
> No, oh, oh  
> No, oh, oh
> 
> The last time I said sorry  
> Is the last time I'll say sorry
> 
> If I could build a perfect world I'd only make you smile  
> I'd hang the stars, the sun and moon outside this room, but I'll  
> I'll never be perfect, though I'm gonna try  
> Oh, I'm gonna do better, I swear that I  
> I won't say I'm sorry over and over  
> Can't just say I'm sorry, I've gotta show you  
> I won't do it again, I'll prove my love is true  
> I hope the last time I said sorry  
> Is the last time I'll say sorry to you  
> No, oh, oh (oh)  
> No, oh, oh  
> To you  
> No, oh, oh  
> No, oh, oh  
> The last time I said sorry  
> Is the last time I'll say sorry  
> To you  
> No, oh, oh (oh)  
> No, oh, oh  
> To you  
> No, oh, oh (oh)  
> No, oh, oh  
> I hope the last time I said sorry  
> Is the last time I'll say sorry  
> To you


End file.
